It’s probably only limited to the UK operations, but it looks like Borders is no more.
The first I knew of it was when I walked in to the 3 storey Cambridge store to find the place stripped. 80% of the popular stock & 50% of the rest is gone. Everything is discounted by between 20 & 50%.
And that rather explains their disappearance. Even so discounted, everything I wanted was cheaper on Amazon, so I added it to my wishlist instead of buying it instore.
Borders has, to me, always been a fancy library with a coffeeshop and a till for me to pay an “i want it now” premium.
And even then Waterstones had better coffee and a more library-like feel.
They couldn’t keep up their original low prices & they didn’t have great coffee, stock or atmosphere. In fact, the only irreplaceable facet was their superb collection of periodicals…
So, goodbye Borders. You’ll be missed, but you were hardly a Fopp.
So… Liam passed a meme my way (via Facebook)…
“Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes”
Well, that’s not going to happen. Partly because I’m a rebel who breaks the rules for the shear damned hell of it, and partly because I’m lying in bed typing thing into my PDA. 60wpm this is not…
- Mort – Terry Pratchett.
I think that this was pretty much my first wander off into the fantasy side of SciFi/Fantasy. Before that I’d tended to read ST:TNG books and bad James Bond clones. I really identified with Mort, despite the fact the only thing we had in common was our gender.
- The BFG – Roald Dahl
I was about 9 when my grandfather announced that I could either have £1 a week pocket money or a paperback book once a fortnight. Some basic maths proved that £4.99 was more than £2, so I started collecting books. The BFG was the first purchase and possibly my favourite. It rapidly became my favoured ‘bath book’. As the steam and occasional dunkings took their toll, the pages eventually crinkled and fell out like square popadoms… It didn’t matter – I’d memorised the book by then.
- Freelance Photography – John Morrison
Yeah… This will be the time i convinced my parents to buy me pornography. We went to Galloway & Porter one day and I found this book. Inside was a picture of some side-boob poking out of a catsuit and a photo of a nude woman in the middle distance of a landscape. Like I said, pornography. At some point I actually read it and started thinking about photographs instead of album snaps.
I’ve just found the book on the shelves in the study. The nude figure is all of 3/4″ tall and the catsuit is significantly less revealing than an old episode of Dukes of Hazard…
- Engineering Electromagnetism – Badden Fuller
This is possibly the most boring book written by the worst lecturer I ever had. This was a man who could put a room full of caffeine fuelled students to sleep in minutes. To make it worse, he loved his (by then out of print) book and had us mark important passages in highlighter. I quickly realised that if you could borrow someone else’s book, you didn’t need to go. So I didn’t. In fact, I forgot about his class until 2 days before the exam. Thankfully his exams were as predictable as his lectures. I memorised 2 past papers and walked a 2.1 grade in the exam. I still don’t know any electromag.
Rather worryingly, it would appear that the book is back in print. My heart goes out to the new generation of engineering students…
- An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge) – John O’Farrell
I’m re-reading this book at the moment. It’s pretty much the antidote to school history lessons. Just now I’ve been reading about how Pitt was responsible in part for the French Revolution by beating the French in the Americas, and how the main purpose of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t freedom itself, but to get the French involved – a tax squabble was boring. Civil war, however? That they could get behind.
- LogoLounge2
This list isn’t going the same way as Liam’s. I’m not sure why, because I do read a lot of fiction. Maybe it’s because I tend to read to unwind and end up reading fluff. Anyway, I bought this because it was cheap and had lots of logos I thought I could steal. As it happened it got me thinking about shapes and colours instead.
- Death: The High Cost of Living – Neil Gaiman
Once again, I spent some time wandering aimlessly round Waterstones while my parents were looking for something or other deeply boring. I discovered a ‘comic’. Except it didn’t involve wizzo pranks and fart jokes. It was a rather cute looking interpretation of Death. I was embarrassed to be seen reading a ‘comic’ so stuffed it back on the shelf as soon as my parents reappeared. It took me another ten years to work out what it was… by which time I’d demolished a stack of Gaiman and Moore creations. I still think Death is cute.
- the Dexter books – Jeff Lindsey
Another recent discovery, I’ve taken to this character incredibly. The cold detachment from the rest of humanity makes Dexter a wonderful subject of fiction. Lindsay has a knack of writing uncensored thought processes that you find yourself agreeing with so frequently you start wondering if you could be a killer too. Or is that just me? Oh pipe down and hand me that Sabatier.
- Austin Allegro – Haynes Publishing
Yes, it’s a bit of a left turn down Vaytay Eff Strasse, but I loved that book. Which was handy considering how often I used it. Haynes manuals are a wonderful world where every car can be fixed by a man with a screwdriver and a beard. A world where every nut comes undone and any issue can be fixed with WD-40 and a mug of PGTips. You could guess that I like the books. My first one taught me that cars aren’t magic boxes full of petrol eating pixies. It was also responsible for the dashboard falling off at 85mph. It was just like ‘Back to the Future’ but with cheaper special effects…
- Classic Cuban Cuisine – Andy Gravette
I bought this book just before we went to Cuba for our honeymoon. I’m told (by Cubans and Mexicans) that it is more Mexican than Cuban, but I love this little book. It’s full of chillies, rum and typographical mistakes (don’t add 2 tablespoons of Tabasco to that dish – it will hurt). It’s full of memories & expectations. One day I’ll eat my way through the entire book.
- A Year in the Merde – Stephen Clarke
Okay… The general premise is that a Londoner gets snapped up by a French company that wants to create an English tea-shop. What happens next is a random collection of clichés and smart observations of French life. Interestingly, a lot of ex-pats in France hate this book while a lot of the French seem to love it. It’s a strange world.
- A Year in Provence / Toujours Provence – Peter Mayle
Despite looking like a cheat, this isn’t actually an attempt to put two books in one slot. No, it’s actually an admission that I don’t remember where the first book ends. The exact opposite of Merde Actually, the Provence books were wonderful escapism. Every year my parents took us down to the south of France for two weeks. Then we spent another 50 weeks staring at rain. This book and its watercolours were a wonderful antidote…
- A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English – Shappi Khorsandi
This book is a very strange read for me. Shappi was born just three years before me. While I was living in a town just north of London, she was living in the middle of London. My father was a second rate surveyor. Hers was barred from Iran due to his satiristic writings. The things she writes about are so familiar and yet so completely alien…
- Confessions of a Dangerous Mind – Chuck Barris
This is another book that I love for it’s memories as much as for the book itself. I read this laying on the beach in Cuba, gently burning in a wonderfully relaxing 38c. Hot sun but wonderful cool, topped up with an endless supply of Mojitos. It’s burnt into my head because I was halfway through before I realised Barris claims responsibility for killing at least one of Fidel’s revolutionary buddies. That’ll be when I realised that maybe I shouldn’t leave all my books in the resort library…
- As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela: Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade – Mark Thomas
If you don’t already know Mark Thomas, well… erm… 1, 2, 3.
